systems Viewpoint Ladders of Authority, Status, Responsibility and Ideology: Toward a Typology of Hierarchy in Social Systems A. Georges L. Romme Department of Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences, Eindhoven University of Technology, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands; [email protected]; Tel.: +31-40-247-2170 Abstract: Hierarchy is a key characteristic of any complex system. This paper explores which notions of hierarchy are being used in the field of organization and management studies. Four distinct types of hierarchy are identified: a ladder of formal decision-making authority, a ladder of achieved status, a self-organized ladder of responsibility and an ideology-based ladder. A social mechanism-based perspective serves to define and distinguish these four types. Subsequently, the typology is further developed by comparing the four hierarchy types in terms of their tacit/explicitness, (in)transitivity and behavior- versus cognition-centeredness. This article contributes to the literature by dissecting the general metaphor of hierarchy into four different constructs and their social mechanisms, which serves to create a typology of the various ways in which complex social systems can be characterized as hierarchical. This typology can inform future research drawing on any type of hierarchy. Keywords: hierarchy; complexity; organization; social system; formal authority; social mechanism; self-organization; responsibility; status; typology 1. Introduction Citation: Romme, A.G.L. Ladders of The notion of hierarchy is widely used but is also rather ambiguous because highly Authority, Status, Responsibility and different interpretations exist. For example, the notion of hierarchy in software systems Ideology: Toward a Typology of refers to different levels of abstraction—such as those in an (e.g., Android) operating Hierarchy in Social Systems. Systems system [1]. In companies and other organizations, hierarchy often involves a sequence of 2021, 9, 20. https://doi.org/10.3390/ levels of formal decision-making authority [2–4]. Another notion is hierarchy as a ladder systems9010020 of ideology, in which people establish themselves as legitimate leaders by invoking some (e.g., religious or political) idea to legitimize the relationship between higher or lower Received: 10 February 2021 levels [5]. Yet another notion has been developed in the literature on organization design Accepted: 12 March 2021 and organizational agility, which conceives of hierarchy as a requisite system that emerges Published: 15 March 2021 in a self-organized manner from operational activities [6–9]. Herbert Simon acknowledged the generic nature of the notion of hierarchy, arguing Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral that all complex (e.g., natural or social) systems “consist of a hierarchy of components, such with regard to jurisdictional claims in that, at any level of the hierarchy, the rates of interaction within components at that level published maps and institutional affil- are much higher than the rates of interaction between different components” [10] (p. 587). iations. Despite the broad applicability of Simon’s perspective on hierarchy, the hierarchical nature of social systems has only been theorized in terms of the distinction between formal and informal hierarchy [11,12]. However, this formal-informal dichotomy does not cover the entire landscape of how hierarchy has been conceptualized and instantiated (e.g., [5–7]). Copyright: © 2021 by the author. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to develop a typology of hierarchy, by mapping the Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. various ways in which hierarchy is defined. This article is an open access article Based on an extensive review of the literature, four types of hierarchy are identified: a distributed under the terms and ladder of formal decision-making authority levels, also known as formal hierarchy [2,3]; a conditions of the Creative Commons ladder of achieved status levels (e.g., arising from seniority or expertise), also known as Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// informal hierarchy [13,14]; a ladder of responsibility levels, arising from self-organizing creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ initiatives throughout an organization or another social system [6,7]; and a ladder of 4.0/). Systems 2021, 9, 20. https://doi.org/10.3390/systems9010020 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/systems Systems 2021, 9, 20 2 of 11 ideology drawing on a set of shared beliefs to justify the relationships between higher and lower levels [5]. Subsequently, this typology is further developed by comparing the four types on several key dimensions. This paper contributes to the literature by dissecting the general metaphor of hierarchy into four fundamentally different constructs. The resulting typology clarifies the central role of the hierarchy construct for any complex social system, by defining the distinct mechanisms of decision-making authority, achieved status, self-organized responsibility and strong ideology. 2. Review Scope and Approach Earlier reviews [11,12] in this area were instrumental in defining the notions of formal and informal hierarchy. These reviews and related studies (e.g., [15]) suggest that formal and informal hierarchies tend to complement each other. As argued in the first section, these prior reviews have not mapped the entire landscape of hierarchy as a key characteristic of complex systems, and therefore a more inclusive taxonomy and typology is developed in this article. The review in this paper largely focuses on organizational systems because an initial literature search demonstrated that the hierarchy notion is most frequently used in the field of organization and management studies. The subsequent search for relevant publi- cations was conducted in September 2020, using queries like “hierarchy” in combination with “manag*” and/or “organ*” in Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com) and Web of Science (https://clarivate.com/webofsciencegroup/solutions/web-of-science). After filtering out studies in other domains (like information systems) as well as publications referring to hierarchy in the context of research methods or other tools, sources were further filtered using the criterion that any publication selected would need to address hierarchy as a core construct. The combined use of Web of Science and Google Scholar was instrumental in locating articles in double-blind-reviewed journals as well as widely cited monographs and books (e.g., [16,17]) in the field of organization and management studies. I only added sources from adjacent disciplines like sociology and law when the results of (reviewing) the initial set of sources pointed at the need to consult these additional publications. This also implies that the next section contains several examples of (hierarchy used in) social systems other than organizations. A complete overview of the literature would entail a database of more than 10,000 publications. Therefore, I adopted an iterative approach in which publications were contin- ually added (to an excel file containing outlines of each publication) and reviewed until a saturation effect was observed; that is, I stopped adding publications when the last 25 publications added to the database did not point at any new types and/or social mech- anisms of hierarchy. Each publication was reviewed and coded regarding the definition, social mechanisms and assumptions of hierarchy. This results in a total of 190 publications underpinning the typology described in the next section, of which 75 sources are referenced in this article. One implication of the review approach adopted is that hierarchy notions at the micro-level (e.g., individual and group behavior), as well as the macro-level (e.g., strat- egy, organization design), are included, while also exploring various related bodies of literature—for example, the literature on requisite structure [6]. Moreover, in defining and comparing the various types of hierarchy (for a preview, see Table1), I adopt a mechanism-based perspective [18,19]. In this respect, social mechanisms such as the “social construction of status” are instrumental in explaining why a specific hierarchy type arises and/or prevails [20]. The notion of social mechanism has been previously used to bridge and synthesize insights from different philosophical perspectives and research streams (e.g., [21,22]) because it is relatively agnostic about the nature of social action and can, therefore, steer a path between positivist, narrative and functional perspectives [18]. This agnostic lens is important here, because the notion of hierarchy is used in fundamentally different paradigms and discourses (e.g., [2,23–25]). Systems 2021, 9, 20 3 of 11 3. Main Findings: Four Types of Hierarchy 3.1. Hierarchy as Ladder of Authority A common conception of hierarchy is to define it as a sequence of levels of formal authority, that is, the authority to make decisions [3,4,26–29]. Following Weber [30], a ladder of authority involves the vertical formal integration of official positions within a single organizational structure, in which each position is under the supervision and control of a higher one. Similarly, Dumont refers to “a ladder of command in which the lower rungs are encompassed in the higher ones in regular succession” [17] (p. 65). This results in a ladder that systematically differentiates authority, for example: the board of directors, CEO, division managers, heads of department, team leaders and operational workers. The social mechanism driving any ladder